Expressive Lies

Most of the recent discussions about lying have focused either on which speech act is required for lying or on whether lying requires an intention to deceive.1 These discussions overlook a number of philosophically interesting questions about the kinds of contents that can figure in definitions of lying.2 I will address one of these questions by showing how recent definitions of lying characterise content in a way that requires lies to have propositional content. Having done that, I turn my attention to showing how a broader understanding of content can secure most of what we wanted from the classic characterisations of lying. My main aims in this paper are thus to raise a problem for recent definitions of lying and develop an alternative definition of lying.
According to recent definitions of lying, asserting a propositional content is a necessary condition for lying. Such definitions of lying are problematic in view of examples like the following three cases that intuitively seem to be instances of lying.